The Judas Strain

Bring on the suspense! Sit on the edge of your seat and enjoy the ride! Well written and enough suspense to keep you guessing until the end. I love a good mystery and this definitely fits the bill. I am relatively new to the Sigma Force novels, only owning one other – The Doomsday Key, but I like the concept. A little historical and scientific truth added to a little science fiction, but fiction that could easily become reality,and you have your mystery. The characters are well defined but just enough is left in the air about each to keep you wondering whose the bad guy and just what is the actual mystery.

In these novels, you begin with historical fact, then scientific fact, and then some mystery is revealed in current day. This is just the preamble to get you thinking before jumping into the chapters which begin the hunt, the questions, the challenge. Love it and will be buying more Sigma Force books

Once again, we have a story that takes a bit of scientific facts and throws it together into a suspense packed thriller. In this novel, we get introduced to another member of Sigma Force, Kowalski, who is presented as a walking muscle but he does have a working mind under the muscle, considering how he sees things.
This story follows two paths of two teams who wind up together in the same place at the end in the search for a solution to a problem. One path follows clues left by Marco Polo during his voyage back home. The other path follows a pathogen to it’s source.

This takes over the #1 slot among Rollins novels from Bone Labyrinth with tighter, better focused action and good characterization. If the character work feels just a hair below the excellence of Bone, Rollins more than makes up for it in other ways. As his characters work through their increasingly intertwined business and personal lives, what appears to be a natural phenomenon at Christmas Island in the Pacific turns out to involve the nefarious Guild, a (real) historical mystery going back to Marco Polo, and the quest for the ultimate biological weapon. The sheer amount of action is toned down a notch from Bones, but that lets us understand better what’s going on, and the focus on key characters is tighter. The usual coincidences and luck help our heroes out, but this is a thriller and we readers accept his as part of the books’ universe. Some of the “wisdom of the ancients” stuff is still farfetched (they knew about DNA how?) but this novel only relies on it enough to make the story work. The biological science is scary, indeed terrifying, and plausible. The technology throughout works fine: a last-chapter connection between continents on a low-power device initially struck me as absurd, but then I started working it out, and realized you could do it, and do it clandestinely, by bypassing the usual military/intel satellites and hiding it in a civilian system like ARGOS. That was reassuring, as I sometimes feel Rollins treats global communications almost as magic. The details of architecture and history are everywhere convincing, and the heroes have to rely heavily on their brains as well as their guns and gadgets to solve the mystery. Some of the heroes (e.g., Lisa, Gray) take the next step in developing as operatives and leaders, and a hunt for a mole (In stories like Midnight Watch, Sigma has a nasty habit of developing security weaknesses when the plot requires it) leads to a jaw-dropping scene about loyalties and who’s playing who. Also, one of the early chapters wins some kind of ingenuity award for the cleverest use of a natural “weapon” to take out bad guys.
Overall, then, I think this is the best-written of the Sigma series, one I had an easy time following but a hard time putting down. Excellent work, sir.
Matt Bille,[…], author The First Space Race,[…]

I love this series. It flows well and is engaging. The author takes real life situations and puts his twist on them while keeping them ‘true’. There is always a section at the back that explains where he got his idea and what parts are true and what parts have his spin on them. Highly recommend!

I am thouorghly enjoying the Sigma series. James Rollins has done a remarkable job of drawing the reader into caring for the main as well as the secondary characters in the stories. The only (minor) niggle I have with his writing style is the repeated use of what I call “mini cliff hangers” to end a chapter, only to have the issue almost miraculously resolved a few pages later. It works the first few times, but loses much of it’s literary punch after a while. That aside, the story telling keeps the reader engaged to the last page. I think Rollins’ signature move is that one part in each book where the content of the entire story is drawn down to a razor edge; the reveal and subsequent emotional release in those few pages is almost magical and Rollins is at his absolute best here. I realize this has been a general review and not book-specific, but if it helps draw a few more readers into the Sigma series, then I will have accomplished my task. Don’t be afraid to invest in this series.

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